Punctuation ban lifted as city council rules apostrophes WILL be allowed in Cambridge street names

Apostrophes have been saved from the scrapheap in Cambridge after the city council ruled they WILL be allowed in street names.

The authority faced worldwide criticism when its ban on punctuation in new road names was revealed by the News – with guerrilla grammarians swooping to ‘correct’ signs with marker pens and local government secretary Eric Pickles calling on residents to defend apostrophes from “over-zealous pen pushers”.

The council had claimed it was only following national guidelines which warned punctuation could confuse emergency services, and argued only one person had objected to the rules when they were consulted on, but today leader Cllr Tim Bick said the policy was being reversed.

Cllr Bick said he wanted, with Cllr Tim Ward, the executive councillor for planning, to “call time on the great apostrophe debate”.

Cllr Bick said: “Cllr Ward has taken an executive decision to amend our street naming policy to make clear that for future new street names in Cambridge we will not be obliged to avoid proper punctuation when it is required by the relevant name.

“It is now clear that the original decision made two years ago to ban the apostrophe from street names flew below everyone’s radar, amazingly even after public consultation at the time. It is a nonsense to deny the English language when applying it to everyday terms describing where people live.

“A minor matter has become a major story and it is time to put it to bed. We rue the day we allowed ourselves to be influenced by a bureaucratic guideline which nobody has been able to defend to us now that it has come under the spotlight.”

Campaigners had argued that Cambridge, as a centre of learning, should uphold grammatical standards, and warned awareness of the historical significance of road names could be eroded by the absence of punctuation.

Kathy Salaman, director of the Longstanton-based Good Grammar Company, welcomed the U-turn.

She said: “It’s not a case of life or death whether we have apostrophes or not but, from the point of view of education and Cambridge history, this is a great decision and I’m very pleased the council has seen sense on this.

This all started a little bit tongue-in-cheek but it got really serious and I’ve lost count of the number of emails I’ve received – with only a very small handful being against my opinion.

“The strength of feeling has been quite overwhelming.”

Emergency services said their systems could cope with punctuation, and the Government denied any of its guidelines advised against using apostrophes.

However, they are still banned by East Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire district councils.